


Artificial State

by Withstarryeyes



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Bones is asked to do too much, Creating A Cure, Dammit Jim, Dizziness, Epidemiologist, Exhausted Bones, Exhaustion, Fainting, Fever, Gen, I'm A Doctor Not A, Infection, Jim is a Little Shit, Leonard "Bones" McCoy Needs a Hug, Overworking, Poor Bones, Pressure, Sick Character, Sick James T. Kirk, Sick Spock (Star Trek), Sickfic, Sickness, Widescale infection, overworked Bones, time crunch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28773453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Withstarryeyes/pseuds/Withstarryeyes
Summary: She leads him to a bed with a patient on it. There are so many patients, so many sick. Bones has been able to keep all but the first few alive, but it’s an artificial state. They’re wasting away in beds, fever burning them up from the inside out. He tries not to think about how little medication they have left. How many patients he can still save, with the stasis injections he has in the storeroom. It is not pertinent to the here and now. He picks up the datapad for the bed, flicking it on.Or...Jim asks Bones to do an impossible job when the ship falls sick to an ancient earth illness.
Relationships: Christine Chapel & Leonard "Bones" McCoy, James T. Kirk & Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Leonard "Bones" McCoy & Hikaru Sulu, Leonard "Bones" McCoy & Spock
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34
Collections: Bones McCoy H/C





	Artificial State

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fill for janekfan on my tumblr who asked for "Bones is my fave and I love to see him overworked and blamed for tragedy! Like there's an outbreak of something on the ship and crew is dying and he can't find the cure but he's working himself to death and Jim is like YOU'RE A DOCTOR! and blames him for not being able to figure it out!"
> 
> This takes place between Star Trek (2009) and Into Darkness.

Bones is aware that it comes in a moment of intense strain. Bones is not the only one on this ship feeling the burden of these deaths. Kirk is responsible for every life on this ship. He’s the one who led them into that mission, who got them all exposed. Bones is just the one who is expected to cure a disease the Earth hasn’t seen for 2,000 years. 

“Doctor,” Nurse Chapel pokes her head into his office. She’s been working almost as long as he has without a break. Her eyes, usually bright, are glassy and her hair has fallen out of her updo, long strands spilling onto her shoulders. 

Bones doesn’t wait for her to finish, already rising to his feet with a groan. Once upright, his vision wavers, black around the edges. He knows that it will not go completely, so he pushes himself into moving, meeting her at the door frame. 

He leaves the words Kirk said to him at his desk. Out here Bones cannot afford sleep, let alone the emotional ramification of his best friend looking him in the eyes and calling him inadequate. He will deal with it later. 

She leads him to a bed with a patient on it. There are so many patients, so many sick. Bones has been able to keep all but the first few alive, but it’s an artificial state. They’re wasting away in beds, fever burning them up from the inside out. He tries not to think about how little medication they have left. How many patients he can still save, with the stasis injections he has in the storeroom. It is not pertinent to the here and now. He picks up the datapad for the bed, flicking it on. 

“Um,” Chapel says, softly. Bones startles, looking up at her. He flicks his eyes to the bed, drawn there by Chapel’s uncharacteristic tone. 

Commander Spock is leaning back against pillows, green high in his cheeks, eyes dark and swirling with what Bones has begun to recognize as the start of the disease. He feels his heart drop to his toes, leaving him clammy all over. 

“Commander,” he says, frowning. Briefly, he considers how long Spock has been feeling off. But it cannot have been long. Spock is a creature of logic, as much as it pains Bones to see. He wouldn’t have risked infecting anyone else by continuing his duties. He whips out his tricorder and approaches, “How are you feeling?”

“I am adequate, Doctor,” Spock says. His voice is already raspy and the last few syllables are slurred. The weight of his responsibility, of his job on this ship, triples. 

He needs to find a cure, and he needs to find it soon. 

* * *

He’s woken from a nap on his couch by blue lights and a shrieking alarm. He’s walking before he’s fully awake, pulling on a mask and gloves. Spock is writhing on the bed when he gets there, eyes fully closed. He reaches over a hand, scanning his forehead with a tricorder. His heart rate is elevated, his blood pressure low. What really worries Bones is the fever. Vulcans run warmer than humans, a consequence of their desert physiology, but Spock is outside of even his species' comfortable zone. 

When Spock begins to wheeze, Bones whirls on his heel, catching Chapel’s eye. “Get a stasis injection from the stockroom.”

“We’re running low,” she reminds him, quietly. The words hang in the air. Bones knows what it means for them. Knows that soon they’ll have to start deciding exactly who gets the injection, and who is left to die. Spock’s heart rate increases another five beats per minute and Bones shakes his head. “Grab one, he’s the second in command.”

As she leaves, Bones stabilizes Spock the best that he can.

* * *

He puts off talking to Kirk. Once Spock is stable and put into stasis, Bones winds his way down to his lab. He gets the replicator to brew the strongest cup of coffee it’s capable of and grimaces as he downs it in one go. Then he sits in front of the microscope until his eyes burn. After, he moves onto textbooks until his brain feels like mush. 

The problem is that Bones has less than two weeks to figure this out. Even with quarantine measures, even with a distress signal out to the Federation, there will be people who fall sick on this ship. Bones has to be prepared for that eventuality, _is_ already prepared. They have ten or twenty free beds left, and those will fill quickly as more and more become infected. 

The beds won’t be the limiting factor, though. Nurse Chapel counted the injections when she grabbed one for Spock. There are eight left. Eight chances, eight promises of life. With their current rate of infection, it will only take fourteen days for them to run out, only fourteen days before people will die and their blood will be on Bones’ hands. 

He bows his head and keeps reading, ignores the signs his body is putting out. Exhaustion. Headache. He’s probably dehydrated. He grabs some water and ignores the rest, shuffling them out of his brain like computer pop-ups. 

* * *

“Fourteen days?” Kirk is at his desk, uniform disheveled. He looks like hell, but Bones can’t judge. Kirk presses his hands together, bows his heads. If Kirk was a religious man, Bones would think that he was praying. 

“If the current infection rates hold up.”

Jim’s eyes cut to him, and for a moment Bones can see the kid he met at the academy shine through. “Will they?”

Bones has thought the same thing. “I don’t know.”

“Can you find a cure before then?”

The room is warm, humid. He feels sweat begin to drip down his neck. His stomach flips and Bones swallows. “Realistically? I don’t think so.”

“You’ll have to,” Jim says.

“It’s not as easy as you think.” His voice is louder, pointed. Kirk stiffens. 

“You’re a doctor--”

“Exactly. I’m a doctor, not an epidemiologist.”

Jim stands then, “Be an epidemiologist then! Christ, Bones, it’s like you don’t know people are dying.” The words are cutting, harsh. A white hot fury fills Bones to the brim. 

“I’m doing the best I can!” He snaps. He’s beginning to feel light, dizzy almost. In his anger, it doesn’t register as important. “Do you know the fastest a vaccine was ever made for a virus like this?”

Jim shifts on his feet, but doesn’t answer. 

“Seventy-five days, Jim.”

“We don’t have that,” Jim says. Bones can hear the plea behind it, the hope. All at once, the fight flows out of Bones, leaving him just exhausted. 

“I know.” He runs a hand through his hair, his scalp damp with sweat. He shuts his eyes for a moment, reveling in the quiet of Jim’s ready room. Once his eyes are shut through, they are reluctant to open, and Bones feels himself tipping, off-balance. 

It’s a series of barely registered moments. Jim catching him by the elbow, the floor under his ass, hard and cold. A shout by the door, the sound of hurried footsteps. A cool hand on his forehead. 

He opens his eyes to Jim hovering over him, blue eyes softened and warm. “When was the last time you ate?”

The words are floating just out of Bones’ reach, incomprehensible. He tries to push himself to sit but Jim’s got a hand on his shoulder, keeping him down. Eventually, the words connect, and Bones slurs, “Don’t worry about me.”

“Sure,” Jim says, “don’t worry about my CMO who just passed out in my ready room.”

“Didn’t pass out,” Bones says, but he can’t really remember. His joints ache, complaining about the five hours of sleep Bones has been running on for the past seventy-two hours. 

A medical team arrives, and Jim helps them shuffle Bones onto a stretcher. He wants to fight it--he hates being coddled--but the stretcher is flat underneath him and his eyes are burning. He lets them slip shut, just for a few moments, and then he’s gone. 

He wakes up to an IV in one arm and Jim in a chair by his bedside. They come to an agreement. Jim will back off and Bones will take better care of himself and they will find a cure, if only because they have to. 

* * *

Bones eats more, sleeps more, feels worse. Every moment that he spends resting, every moment that he spends feeding himself is a moment he isn’t researching. A moment that people are falling sick, that the eight injections (later six, then four) haunt him. 

He spends so many nights crunched over a textbook, over his logs, trying various injections to both prevent and cure the disease, that he never knows what time it is. He measures not in days but in patients, in injections. 

When they reach the last two vials, Jim collapses in his quarters. Bones gives him a stasis shot and faces the reality of having only one left. 

Sulu is manning the con, Chekov doing any duty that he can get his hands on. Down in electrical, Scotty works with a team of two. 

Bones injects his latest prototype into the petri dish of cells and virus particles. He has to wait at least an hour. This is usually when he would sleep but he’s had four cups of coffee and a red bull and he’s feeling anything but tired. 

He goes down to the med bay instead. The beds are not full, yet, but there are more patients in here than Bones has ever seen outside of a major trauma event. Nurse Chapel is in one of those beds, under stasis. Spock in another. 

He avoids both their beds, winds his way over to Jim. His joints protest as he levels himself into a chair, wrapping one leg to rest on top of his other. Jim is pale, lean, face sunken in and worn. It’s not the first time that Bones has seen him like this, but it never gets easier. 

“Why do you have so much faith in me?” He asks, looking at Jim’s face as if waiting for a response. It doesn’t come, of course it doesn’t, but Bones takes company in the sound of his best friends’ heartbeat and he lets himself shut down, just for a moment. 

When he returns an hour later, peering into the microscope, there are no virus particles but the somatic cells are alive. He pulls back, frowning, and looks again, then again. No change. 

He presses the button on the comm panel, “Captain, could you come to Med Bay?”

It’s only a few seconds when Sulu answers, “This good news, McCoy?”

And McCoy can answer with a grin. “Come down and see for yourself, Captain.”

“I’ll bring Chekov.”

It takes them another three days to produce enough of the drug to inoculate the whole crew, and another ten before the earliest patients to go into stasis are back on their feet. 

When Jim comes out of stasis, Bones wraps him up in a hug. Even groggy, Jim mumbles into his shoulder in a constant stream of “You did it you bastard, you actually did it.”

Bones just grins into the cold flesh under his chin and squeezes him tighter. “Yeah, well, you’ve been giving me impossible jobs for eight months. What’s another one?”

The resulting answer is a bright laugh and the shimmering prospect of a full, healthy ship.

**Author's Note:**

> Been a while since I've written for Star Trek. I had a lot of fun writing this, and I really like how it turned out! If you enjoyed it please leave a kudos or a comment. Please let me know if you want to see more fics like this. You can also find me and my writing at withstarryeyes.tumblr.com
> 
> \- C


End file.
